Only write what you know is very good advice. I do my best to stick to it. I wrote about gods and dreams and America because I knew about them. And I wrote about what it’s like to wander into Faerie because I knew about that. I wrote about living underneath London because I knew about that too. And I put people into the stories because I knew them: the ones with pumpkins for heads, and the serial killers with eyes for teeth, and the little chocolate people filled with raspberry cream making love, and the rest of them.

You’ve had twenty years of living, and dreaming. You probably have a fair idea of what it’s like to experience emotions, and to go places, and to do things, and to change. You’ve wondered about things you don’t know. You’ve guessed. You’ve hoped. You’ve probably lied — oddly enough, similar skills to those you’ll have used in convincing a teacher that you actually did do your homework but it was stolen by an escaped convict dressed as a nun will come in useful in writing fiction. Ditto for the skills involved in writing a passing grade essay on something you know absolutely nothing about. Relax. Fake it. Mean it.

And you don’t need to figure it all out before you start writing. You can figure it out while you’re writing. Or you can fail to figure it out; that’s allowed too.

Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive.

[…]

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.

[…]

The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.

I married a man who sleeps with a gun under the mattress.
He’s made his living at war, in an army-issued freight container
near Musayyib where soldiers drew straws to get out of waking him,
the way they had to slam the rusted door and shout his name
then drop like spies before he fired a customary good morning shot.

I found him praying in a chapel ten years ago and took him home with me.
He emptied his pockets after dinner. Condom, lip balm, quarter, compass.
I thought he would be a grizzly bear in bed and he was,
handling me easily even when I tossed over him like a fish.
Afterward he slurped water straight from the tap.

When we married he told me we’d carry our rings in our pockets, just to be safe.
We moved from ghetto to ghetto, covered our windows with bedsheets
and stashed ammunition so he could sleep.
We lay in bed and listened for neighborhood gunfire; he pointed
to the different corners of our ceiling as if he were explaining the constellations
and told me which way the bullets had gone.

He stands at the sink, the turkey
in his hands. He turns it

under the water, removes the innards,
pulls back the loose skin from the hollow

of the neck and tenderly washes
the bird’s open cavity.

He’s laughing when he calls it “hero—”
and “Doesn’t it sound better that way?”

Then, as he cuts the fat, ties the limbs,
he tells me: “Out there, there was no rest.

Some of those guys were farm boys, too.
We snuck through the highlands

where we heard they were camped.
In the freezone, we had orders to kill anyone,

NVA, SVA, you know. The Cong
were gone, but they left chickens there

and those farm boys in my platoon,
they knew what to do, to grab

a chicken by its head like this:”
he slipped his hand over my fist to show

how the palm would fit over a head,
the neck between two fingers.

“They’d slap the chicken into the air”—his arm
shot up then down like a whip.

He said, “the legs kicked and kicked.”
That night, they butchered the birds, plucked

feathers with their fingers, the guts from under
the ribs, the gizzard, the heart, the liver, the lungs.

He said, “We huddled in the grass to eat the legs
and wings slow enough to keep the night at bay.

That was the first time I ever killed anything.”